"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."Albert Einstein MBTI Manual, p32 |
Break by Multiple Intelligence FIRST
Place at least one child with a parallel preference in the Intel 1, Intel 2 and Intel 3 columns of the Strengths Grid with each of your breakout groups.
E.g., for a history lesson, place a child with and intra- or interpersonal preference in each breakout group; for a geography lesson, place a child with visual-spatial preference in each breakout group; for a life science lesson, place a child with naturalist preference in each breakout group.
Cog Style SECOND
For maximally effective breakout groups for practice lessons, try to place kids together who prefer to learn visually, auditorially or kinesthetically together so that they can learn techniques from each other to cement the concept
Judging vs. Perceiving THIRD
(the last character in the Myers-Briggs column)
If you're planning more than 3 breakout segments, do your next cut by breaking apart judgers and perceivers as much as possible.
Because perceivers are focused on "what's the end goal?" versus a judger's focus on "what's the next step?", these approaches can be annoying to each other during a practice session. Your judging groups will try to come to a conclusion as quickly as possible and move on to next steps. "We already know enough to make this decision," is what you might hear from these groups. Perceiving kids, on the other hand, like to drink in as much as possible of the situation before "time is up" to come to a conclusion. "I don't know enough yet to make a decision," is a more typical response from these groups…but they may have explored more of the peripheral concepts of the topic when you come back into a group wrap-up. Another way to look at it is that the judgers will be more interested in concept DEPTH, while perceivers are more interested in concept BREADTH.
Dominant Personality Type FOURTH
(the middle character in the Myers-Briggs column)
Again, depending on how small your segments are for your lesson, your next break will be to create blended groups with complementary dominant types – e.g. NT / NF / ST / SF.
Dominant type preference blending during practice lesson breakouts will help kids gain a broader view of the concept being taught without adding in the layer of inferior preference that the students may find jarring during this stage of learning.
Other Breakout Group Types
Intro Lessons
Long-Term Projects